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Descended From Salinger

Last March I read a sharp story in The New Yorker, “Playdate,” by Kate Walbert, in which two anxious Manhattan mothers get soused and spill secrets during a get-together of their young daughters. When one of the little girls scolded her imaginary sister, I felt a jolt of déjà vu. Lonely child, see-through friend: the image cued another, classic New Yorker story, J. D. Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” published 60 years ago this month. While both “Uncle Wiggily” and “Playdate” explore idealized memories — of a dead lover, of a lost time when family life seemed easy — the stories’ essential ingredients are young children who, though not quite at home in the world, can at least face life more bravely than their parents. As the highball-soaked afternoon of “Uncle Wiggily” darkens, a reluctant mother seeks solace from an old college friend, pleading, “I was a nice girl ... wasn’t I?” “Playdate” takes the conceit of maternal insecurity even further, depicting a tipsy mom who hangs on her 6-year-old’s “thin shoulders” to regain her footing, then asks: “But it was a gold star day, baby. Wasn’t it?”

The offbeat little girls of “Playdate,” whose mothers stumble through parenthood, are not the first characters to feel like cultural descendants of Salinger’s children, those savants, myopics, guileless nose pickers and practicing belchers who seem to glow on the page, highlighting the shallowness of the adults. When Seymour Glass, Salinger’s doomed mystic, declares “a child is a guest in the house — to be loved and respected, never possessed, since he belongs to God,” readers may understandably construe it as the author’s own child-rearing creed (though Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, author of a memoir of life-with-rejecting-father published in 2000, might disagree). Indeed, Salinger’s first readers seem to have taken his prescription to heart, creating the sort of families his fictional children might have longed for. In turn, these readers’ offspring, a generation of “literary, sensitive and sophisticated young people,” as Alfred Kazin put it, saw themselves in the precocious Glass siblings — until, as parents, they helped to decide the moment when paying attention to children shifted to pushing them to achieve. “God’s children ... bound to be adored,” as Eudora Welty described Salinger’s young in a rapturous New York Times review of “Nine Stories” (which included “Uncle Wiggily”), did not just reflect but may have helped shape the new place and power of children in postwar America.

The snapshot of suburban malaise provided in “Uncle Wiggily” was just one achievement in a breakout year for Salinger. In January 1948, The New Yorker printed “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a watertight story about a disturbed World War II veteran who commits suicide while on vacation with his wife. “Bananafish” brought the 29-year-old Salinger a burst of literary attention and led to his famous association with The New Yorker, which acquired first dibs on all his work and published two more stories by him that year. In 1951, Little, Brown & Company published “The Catcher in the Rye,” which spent over seven months on the New York Times best-seller list. Within 10 years it sold more than a million copies. Though these days a staple of the high school curriculum, Salinger’s story of “this kid in New York during the Christmas holidays” (as the author once put it) was originally a book for adults, many of them the kind of postwar suburban parents who had the time and money to lavish on their offspring that their own parents (like most parents in history) had lacked. Like Boo Boo Glass, the most settled of the Glass siblings, these parents owned “two-car, filled” garages and were early readers of Dr. Spock. Their children were one of the first generations to become “teenagers” (the word entered the vernacular sometime around the late 1930s). These children, in turn, bought Salinger’s slim volumes about the Glass family, elevating “Franny and Zooey” (1961) and the collected “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” (1963) to best-seller lists. For an audience of involved parents and doted-on sons and daughters, Seymour Glass’s notion that children deserved not just love but respect would have seemed just right.

As readers beyond the small sphere of New Yorker subscribers started reading Salinger, they would have relished the slightly exotic lives of the seven Glass siblings, possibly the first gifted-and-talented children in literature, who take turns starring on a radio quiz show and find Jesus in their least-prepossessing fan, the “Fat Lady.” Certainly Midwestern teenagers — I used to be one of them — would have been struck by Holden Caulfield’s skill at drinking in nightclubs, misreading him (with the help of English teachers) as a teenage rebel when he is really a Peter Pan hopeful whose memories of childhood field trips to the Museum of Natural History inspire a backward-looking lament: “Certain things they should stay the way they are.”

But not everyone found Salinger’s children adorable. By the 1960s, critics were berating them for the very qualities that had appealed to an increasingly child-centered nation: their untouchable goodness, their self-absorption (Mary McCarthy labeled the Glass family a “terrifying narcissus pool”) and, perhaps inevitably, their popularity. Salinger himself was accused of being an overly indulgent literary parent: reviewing “Franny and Zooey” in the Book Review in 1961, John Updike noted that “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.” Even Time magazine, in a 1963 review of “Raise High the Roof Beam,” offered an artless parody of Salinger’s stylized, first-person narrators: “It is very, very, very true that a large segment of the U.S. young is hung on old Buddy and his six weird brothers and sisters.”

Salinger’s quirky children certainly helped pave the way for less subtly drawn youngsters whose specialty was leading adults around by the nose. (Exhibit A: Hayley Mills, tricking her divorced parents into reconciling in the original 1961 version of “The Parent Trap.”) Yet the brickbats aimed at the Glass brood’s supposed narcissism did not prevent this trait from spreading among Salinger’s collegiate admirers. Like its literary favorites, the generation taking shape in the ’60s was endlessly self-referential, convinced that its shared experiences — from the Kennedy assassination to “Rocky and Bullwinkle” — mattered deeply. In fact, the “U.S. young” resembled an extended Glass family.

These days, kids resemble not so much the Glasses as small Sammy Glicks, running ever earlier and harder, and attention has shifted from the narcissism of the young to the self-absorption of parents. The childhood now in vogue — in which kids’ feats are broadcast on decals on the family S.U.V., their achievements validating their parents’ lives — barely resembles the sphere of uncomplicated, mostly unsupervised pleasures, like stoopball and curb marbles, that Buddy Glass celebrates in “Seymour: An Introduction.” “It’s a Wise Child,” the decorous quiz program that made the Glass siblings household names, has morphed into “Kid Nation,” the reality show in which youngsters marooned in the New Mexican desert vie strenuously for real gold stars.

Still, updated versions of Salinger’s off-kilter, quasi-saintly children do continue to crop up, not just in The New Yorker but elsewhere in contemporary fiction. The adulterous lovers of Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel “Little Children” have near-magical offspring — a “delicate elfin” girl, a beautiful boy who loves to wear a jester’s cap and bells — who help steer them back onto proper courses. Then there is the missing 12-year-old at the center of Charles Bock’s deservedly acclaimed new novel, “Beautiful Children.” Newell Ewing, as surly as his name is euphonious, does not at first fit the mold of “God’s children,” but by the end of the novel he makes a choice, to escape causing pain to others, that puts him in this category forever. These new wise children may bump up against different rules than Salinger’s did, but as unfallen versions of ourselves they take us to the same bright, wild terrain.

Correction: February 8, 2010

An obituary on Jan. 29 about the author J. D. Salinger referred incorrectly to one element in the plot of his short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The character Seymour Glass commits suicide while on vacation with his wife, not while on his honeymoon. (The error also appeared in a news article on Aug. 31, 2000; a book review on Oct. 8, 2000; and in essays on March 23 and Dec. 31, 2008.) The obituary also misstated the name of the yearbook at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, for which Mr. Salinger was literary editor when he was a student there; it was Crossed Sabres, not Crossed Swords. And the obituary referred incorrectly to a work he had written while at Valley Forge. It was a poem that was later set to music; it was not a school song.